The news was out at twilight and by dawn the march towards Rondora had started. It hadn't been in the papers yet but there are old-timers who can smell an oil strike five hundred miles off; and in their wake traveled the others: operators, scouts, vagabonds, thieves and women. The country was locked in by winter and everybody knew the going would be hard but there was gold at the end of the road, so they came on.
The ground spawned rigs... and in a little while the town was hemmed in by a palisade of hundred-feet derricks.
Spring.
Geese were going north and the aspen were budding into leaf. The creeks were running high in their banks from the melting snow, red squirrels chattered and blue jays screamed in strident notes. Light breezes came down from Raton Pass to whisper a magic message and the country popped alive. Jack-rabbits sat up lazily, their long ears flopping; the flowers went red and yellow and green; the grass grew tall and the cattle went out to graze. The mesquite and the chaparral stirred themselves and the blue came back to the sage.
Up and down the land had gone the fame of Rondora. Millions were there. All a man had to do was to take a hammer and chisel and bring in a gusher. They came from everywhere for the weather was warm and they could travel light. They settled like locusts and attracted no attention because everybody was thinking of something else... and it wasn't long before the grifters and gangsters and gamblers were running things.
Chapter II
When Tom Bender hopped a train north he was wearing a white hat that had silk lining as red as the alegria stain that saves your face from the sun.
It was big and hadn't been broken in yet and felt like a house sitting on top of his head. He hated to break in a new hat but his old one wasn't fit to wear to a town like Austin after he got through with those vaqueros. One of them had pushed a .44 bullet through the crown and Tom Bender knew it was only by the grace of God it wasn't his skull.
They were as slick a gang of greasers as a man ever clapped an eye on and they fought like wildcats but he brought four of them in alive. They had been running wet hosses, stampeding them off a hacienda in Nuevo Leon and then cutting out a few to swim across the river and sell to shady dealers in Texas. The whole country knew about it and everybody told Tom Bender they were maldito Indios and that if he went after them he was in for a lot of trouble.
He trapped them on the mud flats south of Rinera where the river cuts through wide cottonwood bottoms and called on them to surrender. They wanted to fight, so he accommodated them, killing one and plugging another before the others stuck their hands in the air and quit. It was a hell of a battle and there was no reason for it because he already had his orders to come to Austin.